title???? a TITLE????? is it not enough that i wrote the damn thing IS THAT NOT ENOUGH WORDS WRUNG FROM MY VERY FLESH AND BLOOD
the song lyrics have abandoned me, no number of parantheses and lower cased words can save me from this hell
“I wring out my flesh for what is inside it, pouring out everything I have written, because what has been has has already been repeated: what has been said has been said.”
(Source: The Lamentations of a Middle Egyptian Scribe, c. 19th century BCE.)
really rude of you to just expose my past life like that
Okay! So while I was getting a little bean to fall asleep, @thatlittleegyptologist and I located the source text, since neither of us was familiar with the title “Lamentations of a Middle Egyptian Scribe”. The line above is actually a rather… liberal translation from recto 2-4 of “The Complaints of Khakheperreseneb” (British Museum EA 5645), a Middle Kingdom text, the original possibly dating to the reign of Senwosret II* (12th Dynasty), written in the genre of national distress texts.
This was a particular genre in Egyptian literature wherein calamitous events that could befall Egypt and its people were described. Some of them had political purpose, such as The Prophecy of Neferti, others seem to be more along the lines of exercise in hyperbole and form, such as The Admonitions of Ipuwer.The Complaints is written on a wooden writing board, extant examples of which we know from the New Kingdom, and this particular board (containing a copy of the earlier MK text) was dated to roughly the reign of Amenhotep II (18th Dynasty)**.
I’ve mentioned this to be a very liberal translation. For example: The use of “written” for Dd is incorrect: Dd here means “said”, instead. Translating X.t as “flesh” is also incorrect: X.tis “body”.
Lichtheim translates the lines as follows, and since that’s a good translation, I’m not going to append my own because it wouldn’t be much different if at all:
I wring out my body of what it holds, In releasing all my words; For what was said is repetition, When what was said is said. (Lichtheim, 1975:146)
The verse then ends with:
Ancestor’s words are nothing to boast of, They are found by those who come after. (Lichtheim, 1975:146)
In essence, what Khakheperreseneb describes here is the uselessness of writing, since it has all been written before.
— *Lichtheim, M., Ancient Egyptian Literature vol. I (1975), p. 145 **Parkinson, R. B., The Text of Khakheperreseneb: New Readings of EA5645, and an Unpublished Ostracon, in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 83 (1997), p63
oh to be more accurately past-life scalped on my own post
[ID: Image 1: the AO3 title box when posting a fic, empty of text, with a red error message underneath saying “We need a title! (At least 1 character long, please.)”
Image 2: A line of hieroglyphics, with a shorter line of four glyphs under it that’s right-aligned.]
